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Technology Upgrades Progress

Hey all,

As many of you have noticed from the big green banner, we are in the process of doing a major overhaul on PAFOA's technology infrastructure and we're nearing the point where development/testing is being completed and will begin rolling out the changes. This process is split into the following phases to minimize any noticeable impact of the function of our setup:

Phases

Upgrade the low-level hosting infrastructure

Since 2012 PAFOA's sites run on a pretty slick cloud hosting setup at Amazon Web Services, however between 2012 and now a lot more technologies have become available that allow us better management of the infrastructure, specifically related to deploying infrastructure and code updates.

Transition non-forum code-bases to more modern tools

PAFOA runs a few websites, some of which everyone is familiar with (forum, main website) and a couple of more obscure ones like the reference library which don't see as much use. Many of these systems were written by myself years ago using custom-built technologies that were great at the time but have become dated. I have moved the functionality of these code-bases to more modern tools which should hold up in the years to come. Additionally, we will be retiring some of these tools and redirecting their URLs to more appropriate places.

Upgrade vBulletin

Because of the size and scope of PAFOA's forum and related customizations, it hasn't been quite as easy for us to stay on top of software updates over the years, but this has certainly left us behind the curve on all the latest and greatest that vBulletin has to offer. Once we complete the infrastructure transition, the next task will be to begin the laborious process of upgrading the forum software to the latest version. This will be a big task, but it's necessary for us to continue to be a great forum.

Future updates

We have a few other things planned for once we upgrade vBulletin as doing so will unlock a lot of new functionality features. Our plan is that once the upgrade is complete we will immediately begin evaluating what new features/functionality we can make available to you guys, but right now our focus is on getting through the infrastructure transition and software upgreades. Our main hope is that we may be able to finally offer a proper mobile access solution to everyone, but please understand that there is a lot to do before that even becomes an option.

Status

Infrastructure upgrade: COMPLETE

The new design of our engineering infrastructure is done and tested in a non-production staging environment. We will soon be creating the new production stack side-by-side with the existing one so that we can begin moving the individual components over one-by-one.

Transition non-forum code-bases: COMPLETE

All of the non-forum components have been built and tested in a staging environment, we will soon begin deploying them to the new production environment and moving the DNS entries one at a time. With these pieces there is low risk that any noticeable impact to you guys. Some of these components will look and behave exact as they do now (like our main website) and some of them may simply redirect to new places (the reference library will begin redirecting all of it's URLs to the statutes pages hosted by the state legislature, for example.)

Move existing forum to new infrastructure: COMPLETE

This will be one of the larger steps that will require us putting the forum into maintenence mode and will possibly have some downtime in the process. While I've done everything I can to ensure a smooth transition, vBulletin is a very complicated codebase with thousands of small features and quirks. Even once we get everything up and running again, we'll all need to be on the lookout for things that aren't working quite right. I hope you'll be patient with us in this process, hopefully it won't be too bad!

Upgrade vBulletin: PENDING

This is going to be a significantly complex process for us because we are using a stable, but very old version of vBulletin and are 2 major versions behind. This is exascerbated by the fact that the forum uses some customizations that are no longer supported and may not even run in newer versions of vBulletin. There will likely be a transition period where the functionality these plugins provide goes away while we prepare for the process of upgrading and we will later need to reevaluate whether it's possible to get this functionality back with other tools. The list of functionality that will be affected is as follows:

vBSEO: Provides the clean URLs that help us in SEO. Unfortunately the company that made this plugin went out of business, we have no option but to remove this plugin and revert to normal vBulletin URLs. We will do our best to set up redirect rules that preserve all current URLs and redirect them to the right place. This should have no noticeable effect for end users.

Events forums: Makes it so we can post events that can be discussed. During the transition period, we will unfortunately have to shut these forums down until we can figure out what else to do. This also may unfortunately cause some data loss, there is nothing we can do about this sadly.

Visual separation of Sticky & non-sticky threads: This is a very minor feature that should not have any real impact.

In Conclusion

I want to thank everyone over the years for your patience with some of the limitations PAFOA's technology setup has placed on all of us. I realize that it's been frustrating for many people who wanted to see us add new features and functionality, and I assure you, it's not for lack of wanting to do it and completely because of the lack of resources available to undertake the complex process of doing these upgrades.

Once we complete this round of upgrades, I am going to be looking for clever ways to minimize the technological debt that accumulated over the last few years. In the coming weeks we may be posting about how technologically-inclined members may be able to help us out in the future. Basically, if you understand half of what was posted in this thread, keep an eye out for future announcements!

I will be continuing to post updates to this thread as we hit certain milestones and close it down once we are completely transitioned.

Thanks to everyone for the support over the years and here's to what comes next!

Re: Technology Upgrades Progress

You're very generous in your description of "keeping on top of things"

I kid, we've definitely gotten a bit behind, but the current push should get us up-to-date.

The real test will be whether the newer, shinier setup will allow us to properly keep on top of things moving forward. I'm hoping that we may be able to open up parts of our development process and technology infrastructure to volunteers with varying levels of trust/access. While it isn't possible to completely open-source the PAFOA infrastructure, there may be a happy middle-ground so we can make use of the (likely many) smart people who use PAFOA and would be willing to pitch in.

Re: Technology Upgrades Progress

Originally Posted by streaker69

Just don't Rotz it up.

I'm doing my best. I literally filled out the form to issue the update command and just stared at the button for like five minutes going "OK, I'm going to click you, please for the love of God do what I think you are going to do and don't break everything, thanks."